


Shakespeare and Company

by PudentillaMcMoany



Series: Like a Gambler's Lucky Streak [3]
Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell & Related Fandoms, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (TV), Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, M/M, but not really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-05
Updated: 2016-02-05
Packaged: 2018-05-18 09:09:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5920390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PudentillaMcMoany/pseuds/PudentillaMcMoany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Segundus is offered a job in a bookshop. Childermass rides a bicycle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shakespeare and Company

He comes almost every day.

Sometimes he stares longingly at the shop window, reads the titles, glances inside. It always makes Sylvia feel like a curiosity in a museum display. Not that she is uncomfortable, nor properly, but it’s always strange. How must it feel to be so ancient, she wonders, under all those modern eyes that don’t know a thing.

Sometimes she risks a greeting; never more than a brisk move of her head or a tentative wave, but in a way it’s always too much. Like a scared animal, he always flees at that.

One day in January, when outside it’s too cold and his jacket is too thin, he musters all his courage; she sees it in how he holds his back a bit straighter, in the resolute spring in his step. He enters the shop, says bonjour with a bad accent. Caresses the spines of the books, checks the price of a volume that is not cheap enough.

When the shop is busy and Sylvia is talking to a customer, one of those young Americans that like her so much, he takes to reading the books. He must think she doesn’t notice, but how could she not? She is a curious person, and it’s her prerogative to pry a bit, so she spies on him; approves of how carefully he chooses. How he is tentative at first and then, inevitably, gets dragged in the book, forgets caution, leans on the shelves for hours on end. She finds it, him, unspeakably sweet. In a few months she knows what he likes: Joyce, Whitman, Melville. What he dislikes, and, with a grimace, puts back on the shelf: Baudelaire, Verlaine, Poe. Of course he doesn’t. He is not a man for debauchery. She actually suspects that he’s a bit of a romantic.

One day she decides to approach him.

“I do not mean to pry,” she lies, but of course she wants to. “But are you English?”

She offers him a job. He looks embarrassed and very poor, and ends up accepting.

She learns that he’s a journalist, although he doesn’t always manage to sell his articles. One day she makes him sit all day with one of her Americans, see what he can do to help him; the next day Segundus brings her pastries.

He doesn’t like to talk too much about himself, but she is insistent and he is lonely. She learns that he is forty-three this year, that he is originally from the north of England (whereabouts? The North, he answers, inevitably). That he likes tea and jazz music, but not coffee or Beethoven. Chopin, yes, he prefers him to Bartok; but Debussy is his favourite. He loves Byron and dislikes Milton, but likes novels over poetry.

He lives in Rue xxx, in a rented room. He has no wife or children, not even in England, but shares his room- “with a friend”, he says, like a secret code, which makes her suspicious. His friend is called John, like him, but he likes to call him Childermass, by the surname, like a schoolboy. She remarks that Childermass and Segundus sound like Dickens characters. He laughs, unguarded, for the first time.

Adrienne meets him, and she likes him and he likes her back. He insists on speaking only French to her, and sometimes he brings her flowers. She always invites him for dinner at theirs and he inevitably refuses; Childermass ends his shift early. They are going to a concert. Childermass has a cold and needs chicken soup.

It seems like for John, her John that is, it’s impossible not to talk of John, the other one, and so Sylvia learns about Childermass as well.

Once John is reading Wuthering Heights, and he laughs.

“Childermass talks like this, if you get him drunk enough.” He points at one of the most dense Yorkshire bits, and together they try to replicate the accent, make sense of the words: _Fahl, flaysome divil of a gipsy!_ , they recite, clumsy. “That’s him alright,” smiles John.

And gipsy he must be, because apparently he also reads tarots; when, jokingly, she suggests that he must be a wizard, John grows suddenly very dark. He is as kind as ever with the patrons, but doesn’t laugh all day. After that she doesn’t have the heart to enquire anymore.

Sometimes, when there is no one, and they have eaten their lunch, they like to sit together at the till and smoke a cigarette. Segundus likes smoking, says that they don’t have cigarettes where they come from. Which is strange, because in England? He also admits, rather candidly, that he has never worked before, never needed to. He is not credible as a pampered heir who has gambled away the family riches, so she wonders what happened to him. To them.

One day, John announces that Childermass is coming to meet him, when they close. Now that he’s become a waiter his shifts are much better. “I only hope that he doesn’t talk too much. He never keeps his opinions to himself,” he shrugs, fond.

“Is he a commie, then?”

“He is, sort of.”

And so she finally sees Childermass. It’s very cold, and he is smoking a cigarette outside, arms crossed on his chest, waiting for John to come out.

After all the wondering what sort of man he is, she feels a little disappointed.

“Workers of the world unite” indeed: he has the lanky body of one who has gone hungry a lot, and the face of every poor wretch that has ever walked the earth. He is hard and sort of twisted, pale but not fair, with a long nose and a mouth wide like mischief: all in all he does not seem very respectable, she catches herself thinking, as if respectability has ever mattered much to her. She is suddenly- not that she is jealous, but she wonders what he has to do with John. What do they talk about at night, she asks herself.

The second time she sees him it’s March. He enters the shop, asks, is John Segundus there? He has a coarse voice and a thick accent, but it’s not at all unpleasant. And his eyes are very big, endearing, she supposes, if you’re into that sort of things (she is not, but John Segundus, she decides, is very much). When (her) John comes out from the backroom, the two Johns smile at each other, and she approves of (the other) John’s straight, good teeth.

One day in Spring, John has finished his shift. The sun is setting over the Seine, tingeing Notre Dame of pink, making the city ineffable, languid. Since there are no patrons they sit outside, drinking a glass of wine in the company of Adrienne.

Childermass arrives on a bicycle.

“For shame!”

John jumps up, almost runs to him, mock-angry, surprised of their new acquisition. Childermass shows him how to sit on the bar, pedals tentatively, swerves, then gains momentum. They wave their hands and ride away in the warm light like characters from a novel, plunging into the rush of the late afternoon, in Boulevard Saint Germain; and here.

Here is love, in the circle of Childermass’ arms around John’s frame, in the blind trust that makes them melt into each other, at ease. Childermass nuzzles John’s hair, looks around, wary that there’s no one to see them, and plants a kiss on the crown of John’s head.

 

In bed, they huddle close under thick blankets; it’s only the beginning of Spring, and the nights are still cold. Segundus has a hand in John’s hair. He likes him even more like this, with his hair cut short, in his worn wool jumpers; not that he says so, but he thinks that this is the right time for him, after all.

He sees, in the maudlin curve of John’s mouth, that he is thinking.

“I always knew that you would be the ruin of me,” John says with grave finality, a crease between his eyes. Segundus wants to kiss it away. He does, in fact.

“Saw it in your cards?”

John nods.

“Didn’t you want to walk away?”

He looks at him with his steady, dark eyes; frowning. It’s one of those times- it happens often, now, when Segundus feels like he was being tested without realising, and now he has failed to grasp the meaning of some deep, secret truth and John is disappointed. But then again, John always seems to talk in riddles- in this as well he is every bit the magician.

“Do you want to leave now?”

John shakes his head, frustrated; kisses him almost in desperation, and maybe Segundus understands- a fraction of the enigma, that Childermass loves him more than magic.

**Author's Note:**

> You know how there are couples (fitctional couples no real life couples that would be unhealthy) where they love each other to pieces, but one of the members can more or less go about their activities without thinking too much of the other, while the other is ABSOLUTELY AND UTTERLY BESOTTED, with big swiping declarations and "I would die without you" and of course they would, their love is absolute and positively FEUDAL and anyway for me the latter is absolutely Childermass in this relationship. I don't know why, but he's so single-minded, so.  
> ANYWAY! Sylvia Beach was an amazing, real woman who had an incredible life. Adrienne Monnier was her beautiful and intelligent lover. CHeck them out, you will fall in love.


End file.
